Propaganda and the Public Mind

Anyone who has had any dealings with children knows that they’re curious and creative. They want to explore things and figure out what’s happening. A good bit of schooling is an effort to drive this out of them and to fit them into a mold, make them behave, stop thinking, not cause any trouble. It goes right from kindergarten up to what Huntington was talking about, namely, keep the rabble out of their hair. People are supposed to be obedient producers, do what they’re told, and the rest of your life is supposed to be passive consuming. Don’t think about things. Don’t know about things. Don’t bother your head with things like the MAI or international affairs. Just do what you’re told, pay attention to something else and maximize your consumption. That’s the role of the public.
People like Walter Lippmann say that the public must be “spectators,” not participants. That’s for the “responsible men.”25 They’re simply presenting a version of essentially the same theory, which goes back hundreds of years. You can trace it back to the first democratic revolution in modern history in seventeenth-century England.

These crimes have been much on my mind since the earliest hints in Vietnam in the early 1960s, concerns—and to be honest torment—deepened by some direct experience with victims in Southeast Asia and Colombia, and enhanced by the cruelty, if not sheer sadism, of the non-reaction. It is perhaps best epitomized in the weary observation in the Wall Street Journal that “the United States, emotionally spent after losing the war, paid no heed” to the discovery that half a million children may have been born with dioxin-related deformities as a result of U.S. chemical warfare in South Vietnam, always the main target of the American assault.

I’m really not interested in persuading people. What I like to do is help people persuade themselves.”

Norman Solomon, author, The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media